Casino Day 2 main - The men and money behind the tribes

The financial backers for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's Middleboro proposed casino are well-known high rollers, but hardly three of a kind.

Lane Lambert

The financial backers for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's Middleboro proposed casino are well-known high rollers, but hardly three of a kind.

They include two white South Africans -- one of whom built a notorious apartheid-era resort -- and an ambitious African-American real estate mogul who brought casinos to his home city of Detroit.

Detroit native Herb Strather was the first to deal into the Wampanoag project -- since 1999 he's spent $15 million to bankroll the tribe's successful quest for federal recognition. He also paid $1.7 million for the Middleboro acreage.

Now billionaire investor-developers Len Wolman and Sol Kerzner have brought big money to the table, confident that they can repeat the success they've had with Connecticut's Mohegan Sun, a Rhode Island slot machine venue and other such projects.

Thirteen years and hundreds of millions of dollars in profits later, "I think our results speak for themselves," Wolman said. In many ways, Kerzner and Wolman are unlikely partners - a 72-year-old child of Russian Jewish immigrants who has bought resorts and casinos from the Bahamas to Dubai, and the 52-year-old farmer's son who still manages a small empire of hotels from unobtrusive offices in Waterford, Conn.

Kernzer was once shunned for building the Sun City resort in one of South Africa's black homelands, at a time when freedom fighter Nelson Mandela was in prison. Wolman, by all accounts, has held the respect of state officials and business leaders in his adopted home of Connecticut since the 1980s.

Despite their dissimilarities -- or perhaps because of them -- Wolman says the partnership has been harmonious from the start.

"We're both very focused," he said. "We (the Waterford Group) have the local presence, and he has a real (international) flair. The combination is very strong."

Getting it started

Kerzner grew up in a poor section of Johannesburg, and got into business as an accountant and then hotel operator before he built Sun City in 1979. In 1993 he acquired and expanded the Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas and built the Atlantis resort there.

Wolman had begun working with the newly recognized Mohegan tribe a year earlier.

"Casinos were a logical outgrowth from our hotel business," he said.

He'd followed Kerzner's enterprises from afar, and his countryman seemed like a good match for experience and finance.

"I wanted to partner with the best," Wolman said.

To his chagrin, Kerzner wasn't initially interested. It took Wolman a year and the help of Kerzner's businessman son to persuade him to join the Trading Cove partnership. (Connecticut-based Starwood Capital is also a partner.)

Mohegan Sun opened in Uncasville, Conn., in 1996, the second-largest casino in the world after the Pequot tribe's Foxwoods. Trading Cove gave up control of Mohegan Sun to the tribe in 2000, but Wolman, Kerzner and Starwood will continue to get a share of revenue through 2014.

Trading Cove has since turned the Lincoln Park dog track in Rhode Island into a slot-machine operation, and built greyhound and horse-racing tracks in Colorado. The group is currently working with the Stockbridge Mohegan tribe in New York's Catskill Mountains to build a casino there.

A partnership forms

Detroit developer Herb Strather had his own indirect connection to the Waterford Group -- Slavik Inc., a Michigan construction firm with which Waterford has worked. Strather approached Kerzner and Wolman about the Wampanoag proposal several years ago. Wolman had even met Wampanoag leadership, "but the timing was not right," he said.

By late 2006, with federal recognition looking more likely, Strather and Trading Cove talked again. This time Wolman and Kerzner were in.

Wolman says he and Kerzner and Starwood Capital stay away from the political side of the deal. They leave that to tribal leaders and Quinn & Morris, a lobbying firm hired by the Wampanoags.

Wolman did donate $500 to Gov. Deval Patrick's campaign last year, but he says he won't be asking for a meeting with Patrick.

Thus far, state approval for the Middleboro casino is still far from assured. Even so, Wolman sounds like a patient man.

"If you look at the history of other casinos, a couple of years to get to a deal in Massachusetts wouldn't be surprising," he said. "We've made a commitment to the tribe."

Lane Lambert of The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Mass) can be reached at llambert@ledger.com.

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